I'm having a bit of a creative streak and I think the talks I'm doing for the University of Manitoba might be some of my very best, he boasted. Not really boasting actually, just really into what I'm going to say up there. Maybe I do best when I'm talking near the Arctic for some reason. ?

Look at this incredible flyer for one of them. It's just like wow.

I'm also talking at the Atmospheres conference next week, and doing a seminar. Please please come and visit.

Thursday, January 29, 2015

Monday, January 26, 2015

Never had it? Never mind : ) Here is something almost as good. Listen carefully. I was listening to this on the express train to Edinburgh (passes through Wigan.... : ) ) . Baby Ford's album is titled OOO--how object oriented it that?!

Jón Gnarr's play was read in Houston at Studio 101 yesterday afternoon. What a treat. If you're in Houston you should totally go to see it tonight--last chance. It's here! Absurdist, painful, hilarious, brilliant, playful--like a fresh wind blowing through you, as Jón's wife Jøga puts it.

Gnarr is the Best Party founder and part of the extraordinary group of anarcho-surrealist punks in charge of Iceland. Which is one reason Iceland is the best!

Saturday, January 24, 2015

I've been listening to your music since the early 80s. Loving the early Tangerine Dream, and some of the later TD too. And your solo stuff such as Aqua. Right now I'm listening to Electronic Meditation and I intend to go through them all by tomorrow...

You carried the flame for AMM and all the electronic composers of the age.

You got atonal, improvised, electronic music in the charts. Need I say more?

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

My colleague John Mulligan has made this very interesting website on interactions between Dorothy Wordsworth and her brother William. His students did a lot of interesting stuff this last term. It's very nice to click on the words and phrases and see so much detailed explication.

"Our minds can be wonderful, but at the same time they can be our very worst enemy. They give us so much trouble. Sometimes I wish the mind were like a set of dentures, which we could take out and leave on our bedside table overnight. At least we would get a break from its tiring and tiresome escapades." --Sögyal RinpocheHahaha!

Suspensions: check. Cimbalom: check. Modulation to the subdominant key so that the main riff appears to emerge out of this beautiful widescreen cloud, as it had been enfolded within it secretly: check. Major key with sadness: check.

Had a bit of a revelation at The
Knowing Uv It exhibition here in Bergen. This exhibition was not about getting to the correct
understanding or correct representation of the work of the painter in The
Showing Uv It. It was in fact an invagination of the materials and themes
implicit in the painter's work (one of which was in the show). Sort of an
exploded diagram. A context explosion.

Ecological awareness just is this
context explosion. Contextualism often (despite its advertising language) stops
somewhere: usually at some kind of human/nonhuman boundary. Hence the rituals
of exclusion meted out by some new left fora on me and Dipesh Chakrabarty
recently. Class, gender, race—but as long as we remain within a human-scale
roughly Hegelian frame in which the silent partner of Kantian correlationism
(the nonhuman entity) is only visible as a projection of the human. To protect
this guilty secret, mentioning bunny rabbits is denigrated as "a hippie
thing" (actual words by actual New Left Review contributor).

Another implicit assumption is that art
is a bit evil and has to be disarmed in advance, and that supplying its
contexts disarms it.

But…

The more context you have, the more
text: that's the simple version of the key Derridean insight il n'y a pas
d'hors-texte. The more world you have, the more earth (Heidegger). The more
understanding, the more standing-under.

And at some point, your context
includes nonhuman beings such as bunny rabbits and geological time. And electrons.

So the context explosion forces you
into intimacy with all kinds of nonhumans, rather than elevating you above
them.

Knowing does not have to be about
rising above. Knowing could be like what sand does to a trilobite. Enveloping
and touching, for millions of years. A sand-morphic sand-ograph of a trilobite.

My uncle used to get very worried
about how a cd player "knew" that it was an oboe playing at 5:23. But
the machine doesn't have to "know" like that any more than a diamond
needle has to "know" it's an oboe. The needle just rides the groove.
The laser rides the sequence of holes. This absolute proximity is called
touching and it tends to be put down in Western philosophy.

When knowing touches itself, for
instance, it is called meditation and is denigrated as narcissism.

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

I haven't been here since 1986! And that trip is etched, etched on my mind. It seems as if, if the weather is okay, we may go to the top of the local mountain here, just as I did back then. I can see it from the charming old Terminus Hotel by the rail station, where you can get a train to Oslo, a train journey that might be one of the very best in the whole world. The aircraft approach to Bergen was as spectacular in its way as the old ship approach, banking low over mountains, bridges, buildings and fjords.

Monday, January 12, 2015

Oh this is so good. I started to teach my graduate class with that title today.

We are going to be looking at a range of continental and analytic philosophy of the last two hundred years, and I'm so excited to be teaching this kind of thing again. I hadn't taught it at the graduate level since the Winter Quarter of 2006 at the University of California. I'd like to think (haha) that I've improved since then so we shall see.

One thing I've decided not to do is overload the reading. It seems to me that the packed graduate syllabus is trying to perform "I'm so clever and learned," which one really doesn't need to perform. And also "You better shape up! This is grad school!" which is also quite unnecessary. What is necessary, however, is to read excellent books excellently.

The thing is, the whole trip was extraordinary, and this was one of the extraordinary moments. The radio station pulled me into this nice dark room behind a bar and just started in with the best questions.

"Depression, please cut to the chase...It hurts just to wake up, whenever you're wearing thin / Alone on the outside, so tired of looking in" wow. And: "Is that the light at the far end of the tunnel or just the train?" Wow. Excellent inversion!

Saturday, January 3, 2015

Over the last half year or so I've been working with Björk on a mega piece of writing about music, aesthetics, ecology, philosophy, religion, politics...

It's so mega. I don't even know how to describe it, even to myself. Best thing that ever happened to me, in writing world. Björk knows how to find exactly the right word or phrase. I'm quite good at sentences. That's a good combination! It was mad to read one word that would sum up about a hundred of mine...

How to describe it. Well, think of all the really good things you know about Björk already. Now multiply them by fifty and add some other good things. I'm so honored to have been working with her. She is a big OOO fan...

Powerful multidimensional intelligence, that was part of it.

There is a major exhibition of Björk's work coming up at MOMA in New York and this is going to be released as part of that. The exhibition begins in March.

So I thought I'd start the new year by announcing this project. I hope you can come to the exhibition. Björk and I think that there is a major cultural shift going on around the world towards something beyond cynical reason and nihilism, as more and more it becomes impossible not to have consideration for nonhumans in everything we do. Hopefully this piece we made contributes to that somehow.

I was so lucky to be doing this while she was mixing her album with some of the nicest and most incredible musicians/producers I've ever met...great examples of this shift beyond cynical reason...

Here is something I think is so so amazing, the Subtle Abuse mix of “Hyperballad.” Car parts, bottles, cutlery--all the objects, right? Not to mention Björk's body “slamming against those rocks.” It's a veritable Latour Litany... And the haunting repetition...

Beyond Sexism, Racism, Speciesism, We Are All the Same

I Wrote a Book with Björk

“A magical booklet of emails between Björk and philosopher Timothy Morton is a wild, wonderful conversation full of epiphanies and sympathies, incorporating Michael Jackson, daft goths and the vibration of subatomic particles in its dizzying leaps, alive with the thrill of falling in love with someone’s brain.” (Emily Mackay, NME)

New

AND

Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is the author of Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), eight other books and 200 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. In 2014 Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory. He is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. Email me

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Zermelo-Fraenkel Free Zone

“Outstanding.”—Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“Dark ecology has the potential to be the punk rock or experimental pop of ecological thinking.”—Kasino A4

“It isn’t [nature] itself that needs trashing — we’re doing a fine job of that already; it’s our way of thinking about it that needs to be structurally realigned ... it's an important book that, in a scant 205 pages of main text ... frames a debate that no doubt will be carried on for years to come.”—Vince Carducci, Pop Matters

“He practices what he theorizes: nothing is wasted in his argumentation.”—Emmanouil Aretoulakis, Synthesis

“Picking up where his most obvious predecessors, Gregory Bateson and Felix Guattari, left off, Morton understands mental ecology as the ground zero of ecological thinking, as that which must be redressed before anything else and above all. Morton goes beyond both his forebears, however, in repairing the rift between science and the humanities, which the Enlightenment opened up and against which Romanticism reacted. Perhaps most pleasantly surprising, given its erudition, is that in its stylistic elegance The Ecological Thought is as satisfying to read as it is necessary to ponder.”—Vince Carducci